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Sidney Monas Replies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Extract

My essay is basically a review of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, and the BBC interview of February 1979. Other works are mentioned in passing, but I tried to limit myself (as the title indicates, but without being too rigid about it) to works written since Solzhenitsyn’s passage West. In no way does the essay pretend to “sum up” or definitively evaluate the work of Solzhenitsyn. It is not even my own last word on the subject. As John Dunlop indicates, Western historians have tended to take an increasingly dim view of Solzhenitsyn without perhaps proper respect for his literary talent and rhetorical power, whereas those whom Dunlop calls “the best Western literary critics” have tended to roll over and play dead when confronted with his ideological illiberalism and incapacity to enter into dialogue. Though Dunlop professes to admire “centrism,” he seems to have missed my middle course.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1981

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References

1. David, Goldstein, Dostoevsky and the Jews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

2. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., East and West (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 147 Google Scholar; italics added.

3. Does Dunlop, in berating Yanov, really consider the “critique” by Paramonov that he cites a model of scholarly decorum?